Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.
When I was younger, I had developed pretty libertine attitudes about human sexuality and I still mostly have the same gut feelings, but every now and then, I bump into things that make me think the conservatives have a point. This is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why? Why do these people insist on doing such consistently risky behavior that they need constant STI surveillance? Even being somewhat promiscuous doesn't result in constant infections, the behavior here really just has to be completely outside the range of anything that most people would consider normal. As you note, the other Life Center apparently spends about five times that much per capita, clocking in over $15K per person.
Making everyone else pay for egregiously bad behavior is just galling.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism
The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
I have no trouble acknowledging that there are many people that support a bunch of Democrat policies that I don't like much. If, for example, someone just doesn't think they should have to pay their student loans, they're probably going to vote Democrat.
On the flip side, the enthusiasm for Harris is genuinely hard to understand. I accept that the firmware update worked as intended and people really mean it, but it is genuinely puzzling to me what they're seeing that they're excited about. The answer is apparently as simple as the fact that she's 60 and lucid rather than 80 and comatose, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't really get me to understanding excitement.
As a bit of an extra point, I think if you'd told me this was how it was going to go down a few years ago, I would have thought a bunch of Democrats would be annoyed that they didn't get a say in picking their candidate. Instead, everyone just happily agreed that they're coconut-pilled now, that they're not going back, and that it's time embrace what can be, unburdened by what has been. That, above all else, is why I can't stop thinking of the situation as embodying the NPC meme. It is very hard for me to believe that people authentically watched some teleprompter speech and thought, "wow, now I can't wait to get out there and campaign"; I don't think it was astroturfed, but I do think that this is almost entirely an exercise in groupthink.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:
Newton was murdered shortly after completing what would be his last film, The Grip of Passion. He was last seen alive at Rage Nightclub in West Hollywood, the gay epicenter of Los Angeles. Newton's dismembered body was discovered by a transient in a dumpster near Santa Monica Boulevard the following morning.[2] Only Newton's head and feet were discovered in plastic bags, said his father, Richard Harriman of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. At the time of his murder, LAPD detective Ron Veneman told the Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, "We have several leads we're working on but nothing that is solid yet. We have other information we're not at liberty to give out."
Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:
Williams discovered that Madden had previously claimed to have killed a man in LA when she was a self-proclaimed white supremacist and skinhead who led a second-life as a male pornstar named Billy Houston.
...
“We’re talking to a person who has swastikas tattooed and is also wearing a knitted pink yarmulke,” Lamberti said. “The person we’re talking to is a gay porn actor, transgender skinhead, Nazi orthodox Jew. You write that down in a sentence, and it’s like, ‘What?’”
Indeed.
So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
From the statement:
But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families...
That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.
But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I am disturbed.
I was baffled, then I got to this exchange and I think I understand now:
Roko - I don't understand why anyone would vote blue in this poll. Can someone who voted blue please give their logic?
Damita - I don't want anyone to die?
Roko - It is only possible to die in this scenario if you pick blue. Red is always safe.
Clinton Coker - The logic for me was, why would anyone vote red?
Roko - Because there's no possible downside to it. Read the question carefully.
Clinton Coker - There is a possible downside. It's right there in the poll.
In this weirdo version of a prisoner's dilemma, everyone can cooperate by hitting Red and all is well, or everyone can cooperate by hitting Blue and all is well. If you have normal coordination and everyone chooses Red, they're all good, but if someone "defects" to Blue, they get killed. You or I apparently don't worry about the defector - just don't be an idiot and you're fine. Other people want to save the idiot contingent so much that they're willing to risk their own lives for it (at least in a Twitter poll). In a scenario where the only person punished by defection is the defector, the threat of that person suiciding is enough to make people change course.
What's wild is that I think this does actually have some explanatory power. When I say that I don't really care about bad outcomes for people that can't do something as basic as show up to work in a country where it's as easy as the United States, this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button. This also seems like it helps explain the efficacy of hunger strikes, which I've never viscerally grasped - if someone elects to starve themselves in response to something, I am morally blameless when they starve, and their argument completely fails to persuade me. I see their actions working on others via media exposure, but I've never understood how the threat of killing yourself is supposed to move others to your position. Apparently, "give me what I want, or I'll kill myself" works even what the person wants is just the ability to smash Blue. To be fair, their impulse probably is pro-social, but it's also completely foreign to me.
Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town has gotten substantial media discussion and has been covered here as well, with one of the themes I see being country, conservative, and small-town defenders noting that the song isn’t actually particularly violent compared to rap. While I think this is obviously true, there’s been something about it that has rubbed me wrong, and I finally put my finger on it while I was running with some country music in my ear from Spotify recommendations. The song that got me thinking for the first verse in Bryan Martin’s Wolves Cry:
Well, I was born on the banks of the Sabine River
Not far from the Texas line
I ain't got much but I'm damn proud of this Double wide up in the pines
I'll do whatever it takes, I'll go to my grave
Protecting me and mine
So you better understand if you step on my land
I'll leave you where you lie
Much like the Aldean kerfuffle, one distinguishing feature from rap violence is that there is implied instigation on the part of whoever’s going to be left to lie, but the verse above leaves much less ambiguity about what happens if you cross Martin on his land. Martin’s music has a decent bit of this sort of edge, with Everyone’s an Outlaw clarifying that this isn’t exactly a Back The Blue situation:
Well, I was raised up by a simple man
I grew up with a gun in my hand
Taught me how to love and how to fight
Taught me what's wrong, taught me what's right
…
Yeah, this life gonna be real damn tough
You take them scars and you call that bluff
Don't let me catch you fittin' in
'Cause everyone's an outlaw
'Til it's time to do outlaw shit
This clearly articulates honor culture values, that you’re morally obligated to do what’s right, including stepping up and killing someone if necessary. These themes aren’t at all uncommon in country music, although they’re usually not as aggressive in the most popular music.
Returning to my point, what I’ve realized bothered me about resorting to comparisons to rap is how whiny, pussified, and self-pitying it sounds to me. While some people did just just reply that honor culture is good, that men should be willing to commit violence against outsiders that wrong them, there was this appeal to how the black people can get away with being tough and cool and they’re way tougher and cooler than country white people, which played into the hands of people that write things like this Rolling Stone article:
These talking heads go after hip-hop because it’s a convenient punching bag. It’s much easier to appeal to Americans’ latent fear of Black expression than it is to defend something like Jason Aldean’s video. Never mind that this is the same ideological movement that’s always talking about free speech — the hypocrisy is nothing new. Neither is the failure to consider hip-hop as a serious artform that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negative ones. In a follow-up tweet, Walsh took an ugly pot-shot at the late rapper King Von, who was killed just as his career was getting off to a promising start in 2020. Has he ever listened closely to King Von’s music, or thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people he grew up alongside in Chicago? It’s doubtful.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.
I grew up in a rural, heavily white area, and the men I knew from that area really do represent the sort of rugged individualism and willingness to engage in violence embodied in some country music. Some of this spills over into behavior that I’m not personally a fan of, maybe even “toxic masculinity”, but I think it’s a culture that’s worth articulating and defending, not one that can only be defended by way of saying that black culture is worse. Jason Aldean is the light, poppy version of this, but country music really does have a fair bit of violence, and it’s good, actually.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
First, you're mostly just going to catch the stupidest criminals this way. The smarter criminals will be able to evade capture for much longer. So we're only catching people who would have eventually been caught, anyways.
Why is this bad? Removing the dumbest and most impulsive criminals from society as fast as possible seems like a net boon. Letting them run around doing dumb, malicious things when they're readily observed being dumb and malicious just seems like a terrible plan.
Second, stupid criminals will make stupid choices. They'll make the decision to run/fight more often than not. This means cops could get injured, or some dumb criminal (and many criminals are legitimately mentally retarded) will get hurt/killed.
Doesn't this contradict the first point? If you're going to need to arrest these imbeciles at some point, you might as well get it over with.
If a citizen ever lays hands on these individuals, we send in the real police to do a summary execution. Otherwise cops aren't involved in anything to do with those stops or enforcement of those laws.
Wait, I thought you were just saying that arresting the low-level criminals was a problem because it's not politically tenable...
It's absurd to pay police officers to be stopping people for broken traffic lights, or for littering, or for evading fares. Because then everybody becomes guarded in their interactions with police.
Well, not everybody. Pretty much all decent people just don't litter or jump turnstiles.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
What things do you have very different personal preferences and policy positions on? Do you have any area that you didn't even realize that until the policy changed and lined up with your stated position?
The biggest one that I have been having a difficult time with lately is marijuana. For my entire life, I thought marijuana should be legal and that it's pretty hard to justify having a substantially different control scheme for marijuana than alcohol (tobacco is quite different and I think the comparison is pretty stupid). I still hold this position due to everything I can figure out objectively. There are a few caveats, such as the potential for marijuana to trigger schizophrenia, but really, I doubt it does more harm to a typical person than drinking. I even smoked a decent bit when I was in my younger, party years, and pretty much just had harmless fun.
Nonetheless, it turns out that I don't actually like legal marijuana much. I didn't really notice it when it was mostly illegal, but weed culture is fucking annoying. I get that some people feel that way about alcohol, and I can certainly think of all-out drunkenness scenes that I don't like, but there are big chunks of drinking culture that I do like - craft beer, good bourbon, wine-tasting, cocktails, tailgating, food-drink pairings, this stuff is all somewhere between lowbrow fun and genuinely interesting culture. Pot though? Just fucking annoying. Stupid aesthetics, lazy slobs, constant whining about how pot is actually good for you, man. I don't personally dislike the smell of pot but smelling it on my state's capitol square on a weekday morning is just utterly degenerate. None of this convinces me that it should be illegal, my annoyance doesn't suffice to want something banned, but damn, it turns out that I find stoners way more annoying than I ever would have thought when they had to just smoke at their houses.
Male and female competitiveness - a case study in the running world
Many of the conversations about gender differences in sports emphasize the role of culture in encouraging or discouraging participation in a gender-differentiated fashion. I think running provides an interesting example of the type of approaches that men and women tend to bring to sports in the context of a relatively gender-egalitarian sport. At nearly every running distance from sprints up to marathon, there is a consistent, persistent difference between men and women of approximately 10-12% (see this slightly outdated chart, the couple records broken since don’t change the story). Relative to sports that rely on strength or are highly multi-dimensional, men and women are much, much closer in actual ability, with elite women outperforming competitive hobbyist men in a way that you don’t see elsewhere. Based on personal observation of the sport and understanding of strategy, this is little or no difference in the way men and women approach races at high levels, with the similarities in pacing, drafting, and finishing kick resulting in a similar aesthetic between men’s and women’s races. Also of note, there is no large split in participation between men and women at amateur levels, with local races and clubs being fairly close to 50-50 and often including more women.
Despite these similarities, anyone that participates in local races will notice one very striking difference between men and women - there are a lot more men that are genuinely competing, trying to do their best for a given distance and fitness level than women. For example, one recent local race I competed in was an 8K with roughly five thousand participants; the men’s winner ran a shade under 24 minutes, the top 10 men were under 27 minutes, and 64 men cleared 30 minutes. The top woman was over 30 minutes and finished 76th overall. The 10th place woman came in around 34 minutes. Without being rigorous about the math, we can see at a glance that there are about 7 times as many men hitting a 70% age grade, which is generally a good cut-off for being a competitive hobbyist. From personal observation, this trend repeats itself in most local races, especially when there isn’t any significant prize money on the line (money brings pros, which tightens things up at the top a fair bit).
Prior to any speculation on what’s going on with that sort of disparity, I want to emphasize that among the women that are competitive, I see basically no difference in approach between the men and women. I work out with a few of the local fast women, these were D1 runners in college, and they’re all the same obsessives about running tons of mileage and hammering big workouts that the guys are. In my experience, the women at any given age-grade above approximately 65-70% treat the sport very similarly to the men.
So why are there so many fewer women in that bucket? Some speculative reasons in no particular order:
-
Physical development is much, much harder for the median woman than the median man. They’ve tried at some point, but they don’t get the immediate physiological response to stimulus that the men get, so they stop caring as much about it. Anecdotally, a powerful female runner friend of mine has told me that she feels like her buildups and improvement are always much slower than men. I think this is physically plausible and that the women who do hit higher age-grades are more anomalous than men.
-
Women get pregnant. Training hard after pregnancy is more challenging than any inflection point men have. I don’t think this explanation is terribly likely because my observation doesn’t suggest a bit change across age groups, but I haven’t been rigorous and I’m open to correction.
-
Fewer women have competitive personalities. Women tend to enjoy the social aspect of the sport more and focus more heavily on that, enjoying easy-paced runs with friends, getting into races to do an event with friends, and so on. Men, even social, friendly men, tend to be hypercompetitive about anything they care about, focusing heavily on self-improvement and metrics.
Any of those could be true and I’m sure I could come up with more, but the reason I think this makes good culture-war fodder is the implications for Title IX. Running is more physically gender-egalitarian than other sports, women participate in it at high rates, women’s tactics, strategy, and training is similar to men’s, the culture of the sport is welcoming to all, and yet, there just aren’t very many women that show much interest in competing. If women aren’t interested in running after decades of mandated equal funding for college sports, what hope is there for some actually gender-egalitarian world in sports more broadly? Is the answer from people that think there shouldn’t be observed differences in male and female preferences just that running is still somehow sexist in a way that I just can’t see? I suppose if you take disparate-impact doctrine entirely seriously, what it suggests is that whether I can see it or not, discrimination against women must be happening in the sport somehow.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime.
Yes, I agree with this prediction. The most common take will be something along the lines of, "see Democrats believe that shooting people that steal from people that matter is good, they just think you don't matter". For my part, I agree that shooting thieves is good, but I expect that most of the soft-on-crime left will maintain ideological consistency and say that it's bad that the Secret Service would shoot at someone that wasn't even a threat to anyone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
For example, I often hear and read comments from citizens of other western and Anglo nations which imply that their "rights" are fundamentally the same as those enjoyed in America
The one that always pops to mind for me as a refutation of this claim is the ease to which civilians can arm themselves in much of the United States. I know that people in other ostensibly free nations will disagree, but I regard this as an absolutely core freedom, integral to whether an individual is currently free and whether they're likely to remain so in the future. If you're required to justify why you need a firearm, no, your place of residence is not as free as mine.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
For people upset about ICE and due process, this coverage is also not your friend. The framings- and the not-very-deep undercurrents that go against the framing- will give a basis to dismiss concern as motivated. The children-in-cage's and child-separation critiques are not going to be forgotten. The fact that not separating children from their deported parents is now a basis of criticism is going to undercut criticims of both. The media's rush to present a concerned father is going to run into discrediting disappointing revelations.
I agree, but what am I to do with that? Based on the "child separation", the "Dreamers", this case's publicity, and the general zeitgeist, it really does seem that the only policy that will actually be accepted by opponents on this is that if you have a child in the United States, you cannot be removed. There is no actual set of proceedings that could satisfy the demand that parents not be separated from their children but also that children cannot be deported with their parents. Any attempt to come up with some narrowly satisfactory resolution that would meet the due process standard that someone came up with approximately 15 minutes ago will slam into some new bad-faith litigation about why of course some deportations are fine, but not this one.
It is increasingly clear to me that getting any resembling what I would consider an appropriate level of deportations will actually just require deciding to be mean in a way that will alienate a significant number of people. My options are not between making a strong legal argument for position or just letting everyone stay, they're between deciding to look mean or just letting everyone stay. If meanness is going to be the actual deciding factor, that's what the decision-making from my side is going to have to be centered on, and I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
While I am sure that there is some antisemitism, I'm annoyed by this being the standard for whether people that are trespassing, camping illegally, detaining others illegally, and so on are worthy of condemnation. I really don't even care whether what the mostly peaceful protestors are on about, whether I agree with them just doesn't actually play into whether I want them to knock off the nonsense. If you're trying to camp in a park, cops should show up and inform you that you that you're not allowed to do that. If you insist on doing it anyway, they should arrest you and remove your stuff from the park. The idea that the basics of evenly enforced law are up to whether the scofflaws are antisemitic or not is absurd (and plainly anti-constitutional).
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
Well, it's going to be hard, because the way EEOC rules work in the United States, I pretty much have to put a thumb on the scale in favor of black candidates. Then once they're hired and (as a cohort) underperform their peers, I have to have HR continue putting a thumb on the scale at each level of promotion, lest I be said to racistly only hiring them, but not promoting them.
Personally, I'd prefer to do away with those measures altogether, but trying to avoid the voracious testers and attorneys of the United States Justice Department isn't easy.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
NPR brutally fact-checked Trump, finding "162 lies and distortions". I am not here to inform you that Trump is a particularly honest man, but this bizarre tic that news outlets have developed of referring to statements of opinion that they disagree with as "lies and distortions" is wildly unhelpful. Let's look at a couple:
59 “The judge was a brilliant judge, and all they do is they play the ref with the judges. But this judge was a fair but brilliant judge.”
There has been lots of criticism of the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. She had very little experience as a trial judge, made several decisions that were questioned by legal experts and early in this case, had a ruling, in which she called for a special master to review classified documents first, overturned by the 11th Circuit.
What the fuck? OK, you think she's not fair and brilliant, fine, I probably even agree with that, but it's just obviously a statement of opinion rather than an appropriate target for some nerd to "fact check".
91 “They wanna stop people from pouring into our country, from places unknown and from countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.”
Someone has likely heard of whatever the unnamed country is.
Wow, thank god for that fact check. Very serious journalism.
135 “I've never seen people get elected by saying we're going to give you a tax increase.”
Vice President Harris has echoed President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. However, Biden has called for raising taxes on wealthy individuals and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% – halfway back to where it was before the 2017 cut. — Scott Horsley
I don't even know what NPR is trying to argue here. Again, perhaps Trump is incorrect in his assessment of the electoral success of promising tax increases, but there isn't some "lie or distortion" there.
153 “She was early, I mean, she was the first of the prosecutors, really, you know, now you see Philadelphia, you see Los Angeles, you see New York, you see various people that are very bad, but she was the first of the bad prosecutors, she was early.”
Although Harris did refer to herself in her 2019 memoir as a “progressive prosecutor,” her legacy has largely been seen as tougher on crime. She has supported some progressive reforms, such as pretrial diversion, which offers certain criminal defendants things like drug treatment instead of going to trial. — Meg Anderson
And on and on and on. These are disagreements, not "lies and distortions". Maybe you think Kamala's great! That she's actually the perfect balance of tough on crime with smart on crime progressivism, that Trump is just too goddamned stupid to understand that, and so on. That's fine! But there isn't a "lie and distortion", there's an actual disagreement.
I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
Had a response, realized who's posting, and realized that it's all a bit too tidy. Oh, yeah, are you deeply affronted by users like sentinellgrave? You're not posting that looking to elicit a response of any sort? Definitely not attempting to move the needle in any particular direction?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Greg Johnson
I'm not familiar, so I clicked through, and kind of did a double-take at this quote:
“Blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable. It is like demanding they wear shoes that are two sizes too small when we impose our standards of punctuality and time preferences, demand that they follow our age-of-consent laws, or foist the bourgeois nuclear family upon them. These things don’t come naturally to Africans. White standards like walking on the sidewalk, not down the middle of the street, are oppressive to blacks. Such standards are imposed by the hated ‘white supremacy’ system. But if we don’t impose white standards upon them, we have chaos. We have great cities like Detroit transformed into wastelands.”
Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with (aside from the age-of-consent dig). Shades of the Ryan Long gag video.
Anyway, I agree, there isn't really any space for a true far-right in the United States. In your link, I think Johnson articulates the reason:
“We White Nationalists claim that the mixing of races inevitably causes hatred and conflict. So it is silly for us to pretend that we are immune to the effects of racial mixture. If White Nationalists who claim not to hate other races are honest, then they are living refutations of their own claim that multiracial societies breed hatred. ‘I am living proof that multiracial societies cause racial hatred.’” [emphasis mine]
Yes, exactly! This is largely self-refuting for most people. If you've actually spent time with people of other races, you probably wound up noticing that some of them are good, some of them are bad, and that group-level forced segregation isn't all that appealing of an ideological tenet. Of course, a few people will disagree, but I don't think they're going to do all that well as a political force. Despite the claims that all white Americans are racist, it sure seems like the stance held by most white Americans is that they don't hate other races.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train.
Probably doesn't matter that much for general conversations. I'm sure it'll matter legally, but when we're having the ethical discussion about it, it's going to just keep coming back to some people thinking that you shouldn't ever get violent with a belligerent vagrant that has not yet initiated any physical force and others not caring what happens to belligerent vagrants. This probably isn't a bridgeable divide and most of the nuance is intellectual window-dressing. Yes, it would be best if the person doing the restraining exercise somewhat more caution than choking a guy to death. Yes, it's also true that restraining someone will not be completely safe for the restrainee, particularly when they're likely high as a kite and experiencing excited delirium. Neither of those points really moves the needle from people's gut responses.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2yr ago
It's a national issue - I don't just want them out of my state, I want them out of country. I want them to never try coming back. This requires changing the prevailing national political winds, not just state-level policy that shifts which states illegal aliens prefer to live in. If I lived in Florida, sure, I'd also want a hardline approach that's effective in the short-run, but I would still be in favor of this sort of political gamesmanship.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
I am open to the idea that this is actually the best policy given a number of realistic political constraints. This does not move me to find it less galling that I'm stuck paying for people to live degenerate lifestyles. Avoiding HIV is absolutely trivial, but the "community" in question apparently insists on spreading HIV.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
Sometimes, yeah. We tacitly acknowledge this with all punitive justice - we may not be able to make a right, but the best we can do is visible punishment of transgressors.
Additionally tit-for-tat is a better game theoretical strategy than cooperating with a defectbot.
In any case, the situation can't be addressed with cliches, at least not adequately. The response like what @satanistgoblin is expressing above is largely about the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of people that have excused all manor of political terrorism in the past (including the recent past, when BLM rioters killed dozens and destroyed billions in property) suddenly deciding that a riot that got out of hand requires tracking down everyone present and charging them under novel interpretations of statute that had never previously occurred to anyone.
Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.
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